Xi met Medvedev at his suburban residence a day after holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and overseeing the signing of a raft of energy and other agreements as part of a three-day visit ending today.

The Chinese leader, who arrived in Russia along with much-watched first lady Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), told Medvedev that his choice of Russia for his first foreign visit was “in order to show the special importance of our relations.”

Xi said on Friday that he and Putin had agreed on a deal that will see Russia, the world’s largest energy producer, increase oil supplies to China, the world’s biggest energy consumer.

“We can already say this is a historic visit with positive results,” Putin said after he and Xi presided over the signing of an agreement between Russian oil company Rosneft and China’s state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC, 中國石油天然氣).

Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom also signed a preliminary agreement paving the way for a future 30-year contract that would see Russia begin sending gas to China in 2018.

The Chinese leader yesterday hailed Russian-Chinese relations as a guarantee of international peace during a televised speech that was translated into Russian.

“Chinese and Russian relations are some of the most important bilateral relations in the world. Our relations are the best among the bilateral relations between great powers,” he told students at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

From Moscow, Xi is to travel to Africa to shore up his resource-hungry country’s soaring influence on the continent with visits to Tanzania, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.